There isn’t much America throws away.
Julia Child’s kitchen? We’ve got that. Enola Gay? Saved that. Everything from dinosaur bones to Eli Whitney’s cotton gin to a Mercury space capsule has been preserved by the Smithsonian Institution.
The Smithsonian has roughly 137 million specimens, artifacts and artwork — and 20 million photographs on top of that, says Richard Kurin, the museum’s under secretary for history, art and culture.
One-hundred-one of them are showcased in a new coffee-table book on the history of America. While it includes most of what you expect — Abraham Lincoln’s hat, the Kitty Hawk Flyer — it also displays items from the recesses of the delightfully offbeat collection. Like the Bakelizer, a 1,400-pound, egg-shaped metal industrial device from 1909. It produced Bakelite — the first commercially viable plastic.
These pieces tell the history of a nation not just by its rulers, but by its inventions, its heroes — and the lives of average Americans.
The Smithsonian is unique among world museums “in that way in really being much more democratic in what they collect,” Kurin says. “There’s a deeply embedded notion, a wonderful notion, that everybody has a place in history.”
Here are some of the more unexpected items you’ll find in the book and the museum:
Plymouth Rock Fragment
An example of how Americans like to hold onto their history — literally.
The Mayflower delivered Puritan settlers to the new world in 1620, entering Plymouth harbor on Dec. 11. In 1741, the 94-year-old town historian, Thomas Faunce, first mentioned in print the precise boulder his father had told him the settlers had set foot upon to found the colony.
In 1774, the townspeople wanted to move the rock to the main square, to signal their desire to be free from British rule. But the rock split in two. Little pieces of Plymouth Rock were then broken off and displayed in cities across the nascent nation.
Eventually, the broken piece was cemented back onto the “mother rock” — the one still in place at the wharf — and protected by a canopy against souvenir hunters.
This 2-by-4 inch piece, one of two stored at the Smithsonian, is inscribed with “Broken from the Mother Rock by Lewis Bradford on Tuesday 28th of Dec. 1830 4 1/4 O’clock PM.”
“Here is a stone which the feet of a few outcasts pressed for an instant,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote. “It is treasured by a great nation; its very dust is shared as a relic.”
George Washington’s sword & Benjamin Franklin’s walking stick
When Washington died, he bequeathed his five swords to his five nephews, to be used only “in the defense of [the] country and its origins.”
Samuel Washington, who served in the Continental Army with his uncle, took the sword the first president used in battle. After his death in 1831, he left the sword to his son, Samuel T. Washington.
Benjamin Franklin, meanwhile, gave his cane (below) to George Washington upon his death — “my fine crab-tree walking stick, with a gold head curiously wrought in the form of cap of liberty.” The “cap of liberty” referred to Franklin’s fur cap, a symbol of America that had amused and impressed the French.
The stick, too, passed to Samuel T. Washington. In 1843, he asked Virginia Congressman George Summers to have the two donated to the government.
“Let the sword of the hero and the staff of the philosopher go together,” Summers said to Congress. “Let them have a place among the proudest trophies and most honored memorials of our national achievements.”
There are two items, though, that the Smithsonian is missing from the Founding Fathers. One is an actual fur cap worn by Franklin, lost to history — or perhaps left in France.
The other is the original Declaration of Independence, sent to be printed on July 4, 1776. There are early drafts by Thomas Jefferson and actual printed copies. But the presumably hand-written, unsigned document sent to the printer — if it still exists, no one knows where it is.
Sitting Bull’s drawing book
The Lakota Sioux tribal chief shocked America when he defeated Lt. Col. George Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn.
Sitting Bull escaped to Canada, where he stayed for five years, refusing the United States’ offer of a pardon if he lived on a reservation. But without enough buffalo to survive, Sitting Bull returned with 200 of his people. “I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle,” he said.
While a prisoner at Fort Randall in the Dakota Territory in 1882, Sitting Bull was given a ledger, colored pencils and watercolors. He mostly drew his exploits against other Indian tribes, such as the Assiniboine and Crow. The ledger is a stunning recreation of his life and his people. For instance, he traces his own arc by drawing himself in eight different headdresses that reflect his status and accomplishments.
The drawing below is by another Lakota, Red Horse, who drew a series on the Battle of Little Bighorn in another ledger held by the Smithsonian.
Appomattox court house furnishings
Trying to hold on to history isn’t always easy.
The terms of surrender for the Civil War were signed in the home of Wilmer McLean in the village of Appomattox Court House in 1865.
Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee sat in the caned armchair to the left; Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant sat in the desk chair to the right.
Recognizing the historic significance, Union officers took the furniture — without McLean’s permission.
The pieces were passed around, even auctioned off. George Custer’s widow owned the table for a time, storing it in a fireproof New York City warehouse and taking it on special occasions.
It took decades for the objects to be donated to the Smithsonian. Even then, Virginia campaigned to have them returned. The compromise: The furniture was provided so that convincing replicas could be made, which are now on display at the restored Appomattox Court House. But the originals remain in the hands of the Smithsonian.
Marian Anderson’s mink coat
Of all the artifacts of slavery and civil rights, this may be the most unusual — and one of the most inspiring.
Contralto Marian Anderson was a world famous singer in 1939, mesmerizing audiences from Carnegie Hall to Europe. But finding a venue in segregated Washington, DC, proved nearly impossible. The Daughters of the American Revolution, which administered Constitution Hall, blocked her booking, causing Eleanor Roosevelt to resign her membership. Eleanor and the president then arranged for Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial.
More than 70,000 people turned out, and Harold Ickes, secretary of the interior, introduced her with, “In this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free.”
Anderson opened with “America” and closed with “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”
“I am shocked beyond words to be barred from the capital of my own country after having appeared almost in every other capital in the world,” she said before the show.
Twenty-six years later, Anderson appeared again at the Lincoln Memorial — singing for Martin Luther King Jr.’s march on Washington.
The Smithsonian is building a new branch — the National Museum of African American History and Culture, slated to open in 2015. Putting that collection together shows how historical items keep turning up, Kurin says. For instance, the Bible of Nat Turner, who led a slave rebellion, was recently discovered. The Smithsonian collection is never complete.
Martha, the last passenger pigeon
They once numbered in the billions, the most common bird in the United States. The wild, or passenger, pigeon were so numerous that flocks of them would block out the noonday sun like an eclipse, John James Audubon wrote.
Then the unthinkable happened — the passenger pigeon was driven to extinction.
Forests were cleared for farming, and pigeons migrated. Then they were shot for eating crops or hunted for food. In 1878, in Michigan, an astounding 7 million birds were hunted and killed. They were sold in the cities as meat for 50 cents a dozen.
The label for this stuffed passenger pigeon is “Martha, last of her species, died at 1 pm, 1 September 1914, age 29, in the Cincinnati Zoological Garden.” She will be displayed again in 2014, the centennial of her death.
Katharine Hepburn’s Oscars
Katharine Hepburn won the first Oscar. Oh, there were people who won the Academy Award before her. But in 1934, columnist Sidney Skolsky, supposedly stumped on how to spell “statuette,” claims he came up with the nickname, writing “Katharine Hepburn won the Oscar for her performance as Eva Lovelace in ‘Morning Glory.’ ”
So who better to represent the rise of modern Hollywood than Hepburn, who has the most best-acting awards — four — of any star.
The first award was bronze and gold plated. The others, for “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” “The Lion in Winter” and “On Golden Pond” were the later versions — slightly taller, made of an alloy, britannium, coated in gold.
Hepburn did not display the awards when she was alive, but after her death her estate loaned the awards to the Smithsonian. They were so pleased with the reaction that the Oscars were donated and are now on permanent display.
